bath house model 01 —
a cast series of cast-in-place section cuts through a conceptual bath house that I am working through at the University of Oregon at Portland. This process of modeling has taught me lessons of casting with a new material, that being a proprietary hydraulic cement. Much like plaster this cement sets up quickly, has very fine aggregate, and even color. The color turned out to be more variable than I had wished for, slight variances in mix and some mysterious outcomes would literally surface. A black film coated the top of the first piece and when I attempted to wash and sand the black off it spread like charcoal and would not come off the face. The next three pours did not result in any black film whatsoever. The negative spaces were formed by laser cut and stacked MDF cut outs. The form release process was aided by an application of canola oil before pouring. A few pieces I tested on before the final piece shattered as I tried to tool out the MDF cutouts.
A few of concrete walls (1/4") were not thick enough to withstand the form removal process. As seen in this and the following image. A generic 'super' glue was used to adhere the fragments back together.
The cast section models give shallow spatial representations of the architecture. This was used as a study tool to begin to understand some of the connections between spaces. Be that purely formal connections, or how light plays between void spaces. Another go at this might lead to deeper cavities and one further level of detail. Those two improvements alone would give a much more defined sense of the spatial qualities one might expect.
